How many days a safari really needs

When you write to me saying “I'd like to do a safari”, the first thing I ask is not which park, but how many days you have. It is not a bureaucratic question: everything else follows from it, and above all it decides whether what you are picturing is achievable or not.

The reason is simple and has little to do with Kenya: between the coast and the parks there is road, and that road cannot be compressed. Every hour spent in the car is an hour you do not spend looking out of the window at something that moves.

What really changes between one day and three

• One day only: almost all of it is transfer. You see the park in the middle hours, which are the worst, when the heat keeps the animals still in the shade. It works as a taste, not as a safari.
• Two days and one night: two game drives in the good hours fit in, late afternoon and early morning. In my view it is the threshold below which setting off from the coast is not worth it.
• Three or four days: you can change park without doing everything at a run, and the days stop being a chase from one gate to the next.
• Beyond four days: you begin to see the differences between one environment and another, which is the part that stays with the people who come back.

The hours that count

Animals move above all when the temperature is low: early morning and the last part of the afternoon. A programme that gets you into the park at midday and out again at three is not a bad programme out of malice, it is a programme built around the road instead of around the animals.

Even with the right number of days, though, nobody can guarantee you a sighting. What the extra days give you is more attempts and less hurry, which in practice is the thing that makes the difference.

How to think about it when the days are few

If you genuinely have only one day, I will tell you that there are alternatives from the coast that give you more: the forest, the creek, the canyons inland. It is not a way of steering you onto something else, it is that I would rather you went home happy than tired and disappointed.